Alan Lomax and Sauteed Tongue

Another installment from Sylvia Luppert's first email:

During our time in New York, Linge worked for Alan Lomax, the great American musicologist. He was engaged by Columbia University to study the connections between culture and music. She was his office manager. She met many of the luminaries of folk music during that period. Also during this period, she embarked on a weird crusade to learn to cook. She admired Alan Lomax’s sophisticated tastes in food and knowledge of cuisines. We both had meat and potatoes upbringings, but Alan Lomax took her to lunch frequently, and these lunches frequently inspired her cooking. Although we didn’t own a cookbook, she was unafraid to try the most exotic dish (at least exotic to us.) At one lunch, Alan had tongue. Our mothers never cooked tongue and we had never tasted tongue.

She brought home a big ugly cows tongue that made me, at least, nauseous to behold it. It had taste buds all over it! Not having previous experience with cooking or eating tongue, she sliced it and sauteed it. (Tongue, properly cooked, must be boiled for hours.) The tongue she served was as tough as you could imagine, and it was covered with - yuck - taste buds. I probably had no more than a couple of bites. She gamely ate the entire slice. The uncooked part of the tongue went in the freezer for the remainder of our time in that apartment.